Skyline Drive and the Ridge Above Rapid City
The long hogback ridge that rises just west of downtown Rapid City has always offered the obvious thing a hill offers a growing town: a view. From its crest a person can take in the city spread along Rapid Creek below, the dark line of the Black Hills behind, and the open prairie running east toward the horizon. For most of the town’s early decades the ridge was simply there, a steep and undeveloped backdrop. In the 1930s it became something more deliberate, a scenic road and a perch that the city built for itself in hard times.
Skyline Drive was laid out along the spine of the ridge during the Depression, the kind of public works project that the era produced in number. Cutting and grading a road along a steep ridgeline was substantial labor, and projects of this sort across the Black Hills relied heavily on relief workers and federal money channeled through programs designed to put the unemployed back to work. The result was a winding road that climbed to the crest and ran along it, opening the view to anyone who could drive up rather than only to those willing to climb.
The dinosaurs on the ridge
What made Skyline Drive famous, though, was not the road but what someone decided to put at the top of it. In the mid-1930s a group of figures took shape along the ridge: enormous concrete dinosaurs, built to a green-painted, vaguely prehistoric design and set where they would be visible from the town below. The largest, a long-necked apatosaurus stretching along the crest, became the best known. The figures were meant partly as a civic ornament and partly as a draw for the tourists who were beginning to pour into the Black Hills, and they tied the ridge loosely to the region’s genuine fossil heritage, the ancient beds that have made the surrounding country important to paleontology.
The dinosaurs were never scientifically accurate, and they were never meant to be. They were roadside spectacle of a wholesome 1930s kind, a thing for families to drive up to, photograph, and remember. Generations of Rapid City children have known them simply as the dinosaurs on the hill, lit at night and visible from much of town, and they have become one of the city’s most recognizable landmarks. The park around them, with its commanding overlook, remains a free and easy outing, the sort of place locals take visiting relatives. The story of how the figures came to be is told more fully in the history of Dinosaur Park itself.
A road with a longer history
The ridge carried other meanings before it carried dinosaurs and a scenic road. In the town’s rough early years the high ground overlooking the settlement had a grimmer association, the kind of association that frontier towns attached to a convenient hill, and the nearby M Hill kept echoes of that past in its old nicknames. Skyline Drive belongs to a later and gentler chapter, when the city had grown secure enough to think of its hills as scenery rather than as the edge of a hard frontier.
What the road and its strange green tenants share is a certain civic optimism. They were built in a difficult decade by people who chose, despite everything, to invest in beauty, in view, and in a bit of harmless whimsy that would outlast the hard times. The view from the ridge still does its plain work, laying the whole city and the front range of the Hills out below in a single sweep. And the dinosaurs still stand watch over Rapid City, improbable and beloved, a Depression-era gift that the town has never seen any reason to give up.